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Super
Sleuth
If you're a Howe Street scammer, David
Baines is the guy whose call you dread
By Timothy Taylor
DAVID BAINES, THE AWARD-WINNING Vancouver
Sun business columnist, well known for his unflagging
antagonism towards stock market scammery of any stripe,
agreed to be profiled but thought it would be a good
idea if the writer involved did a bit of background
reading first. So it was that on an atypically sunny
day last autumn, I walked over to the Vancouver
Sun to pick up what turned out to be the most enormous
stack of photocopying I’d ever seen in my life.
A cinder block of paper, about 750 double-sided pages
of small type. Which, being a writer myself, I can translate
into a stunning word count for you: just shy of a million.
Call it a dozen novels, folks. An ouvre for most writers.
Although in Baines’ case, it represented just
a slice of his output over the past 18 years at the
Sun. Staggering. But a suitable introduction
to the man, I think. And an illustration that a certain
sort of Vancouver personality type might do well to
examine. Which sort? Remember that Vin Diesel movie
Boiler Room: brokers with a bank of telephones
conning old folks out of their retirement funds? Guys
who bond after work over pizza and the movie Wall
Street, reciting the words from the Gordon Gekko
“greed is good” scene aloud?
That sort of people. Because for them, the Cinder Block
proves the relevant point that Baines is one of an old
breed. With his complete lack of media-age bluster—the
57-year-old Baines is mild in person, a rec-hockey-playing
suburban dad of three, married 25 years, not above a
cuss but cautious otherwise with his choice of words—he’s
one who pursues an old-school line: tireless investigation
followed by tireless exposition. And over the years,
that exposition really adds up.
Of course if you’re not one of those people—if,
for example, the “greed is good” scene reminds
you of Ivan Boesky’s use of the same phrase, a
deployment of moral ambiguity in service of ethical
and legal decrepitude—then perhaps a recap is
in order.
Baines didn’t start out in journalism aiming to
become the scourge of the scamming classes. The son
of a banker, he was born in Vancouver but began his
professional life in 1972 as a beat reporter at the
Winnipeg Tribune, having graduated with a degree
in English Literature from Queen’s. He moved to
Vancouver and to the Sun in 1974, during what
he refers to as the paper’s “salad days,”
meaning that they had enough money at that time to send
ambitious reporters back to school. Which Baines did
in 1976, in a bid to move up into the Sun’s
management team. He got that promotion in 1978, on graduation
from Western with an MBA, and became a finance analyst
just in time for the paper to be hit with a nine-month
strike.
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Baines is one
of an old breed. He's one who pursues an old-school
line: tireless investigation followed by tireless
exposition.
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Disillusioned, Baines left journalism and took his MBA
into commercial banking, working at the Bank of Montreal
and the Toronto Dominion for a total of four years.
“But I wasn’t a very good banker,”
he laughs now. “I didn’t like the environment
very much, the regimentation and hierarchical structure.”
Returning to journalism solved these
problems. But it also provided Baines the opportunity
to make a life-changing discovery. He’d been introduced
to the business world via commercial banking, where
companies were appraised using the famously conservative
four C’s of lending: credit, capital, collateral
and capacity. In the Vancouver Stock Exchange (VSE)
promotion game to which he was introduced as the Sun’s
newest business columnist, Baines found absolutely none
of the above. Promoters weren’t even selling what
he would acknowledge as “financial investments,”
preferring another term instead—“paper dreams.
It was totally astounding to me. The contrast in morality
was stunning.”
What he’s referring to is a set of stock promotion
practices so entrenched by the time he came back on
the scene in 1985 that he refers to it as a template.
“You have a stock offering, and it goes through
the lawyers and the accountants and the geologists and
the brokerage firm, and they all issue the caveats they
have to, to keep out of trouble with their professional
organizations. But no one stops to look at what falls
off the other side."
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